NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan Z review has leaked prior to its launch sometime in Q2 2014 and things don’t look well for the upcoming flagship card from NVIDIA. The GeForce GTX Titan Z is the first graphics card solution featuring NVIDIA high-performance GK110 core architecture which has spanned an entire generation as the GeForce 700 series high-end cards namely the GeForce GTX 780, GeForce GTX 780 Ti, GeForce GTX Titan, GeForce GTX Titan Black and now the GeForce GTX Titan Z. The benchmark was leaked by a Hong Kong based tech site which has been revealed courtesy of Videocardz.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan Z Review Leaks Prior To Launch

The shocking thing is that there’s no conformation about the cards launch with the reason blamed to be the final drivers which we were are starting to believe would be false and has more to do with the performance of NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan Z which lacks severely behind its competitor such as the AMD Radeon R9 295X2. The card has been delayed two times during 29th April and 8th May. It looks like the earlier rumor about the boost speeds are true and the card is clocked at 1058 MHz but let’s take a brief look at the specifications before going into the performance section.

The GeForce GTX Titan Z is manufacture red with two GK110-350-B1 chips under its hood that pack 7.1 billion transistors each. The GeForce GTX Titan Z replaces the GeForce GTX 690 boasting dual-GK110 cores compared to dual-GK104 cores on its predecessor. The GeForce GTX Titan Z will feature two GK110 cores with 5760 Cuda Cores, 448 TMUs and 96 ROPs. The card features a 384-bit x 2 bus which will run across a massive 12 GB VRAM. This is an impressive feature giving developers and games an unprecedented amount of VRAM for use. The memory is clocked at 7 GHz effective clock speed. The core clock speeds are maintained at 705 MHz base and 876 MHz boost clock and the card features a maximum single precision performance of 8.1 TFlops and 2.3 TFlops of double precision.

The design of the GeForce GTX Titan Z is beefier compared to the GeForce GTX 690. The design is similar but the card takes up three slots to provide optimal thermals with the Dual GK110 cores in action. The card will feature dual black colored Vapor chambers placed on top of each GK110 core while a large cooler fan will push air from the internal assembly, cooling the components and letting the heat out of the front exhaust. The display outputs include Dual-DVI, HDMI and a Display Port. The card has a single SLI gold finger to enable two of these cards to function as multiple GPUs. The card is fed through dual 8-Pin connectors which represent a TDP of 375W. The card has a beefy 12 Phase PWM supply and with a 450W heatsink under its hood, the GeForce GTX Titan Z will actually be able to sustain overclocking on air around the 1 GHz mark.

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan Z is backed by a steep price tag of $2999 US which will make it look like an enthusiast focused card but NVIDIA did mention that the card is aimed towards both gamers and professionals since the power of GK110 and its CUDA Compute capabilities will be available to users at a much lower price tag compared to their Quadro and Tesla variants. Hence the price tag may make sense to some but for gamers, the competitor Radeon R9 295X2 which is priced at half of what NVIDIA’s asking for their flagship card ($1499 US) is going to look like a better option. The NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan Z has it advantages when it comes to drivers, application support, GeForce optimized titles, 12 GB VRAM (6 GB per GPU) and a cooler that is said to be both silent and aesthetically pleasing for those who are cautious about the looks of their cards.

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The triple slot design does take up more space making it somewhat of a downside compared to the GeForce GTX 690 which took 2 slots but still could be configured in ITX and small form factor rigs. Maybe modders will found a way to solve this issue but it does take up less space in a traditional PC setup as compared to Radeon R9 295X2 which involves the use of closed loop AIO liquid cooling solutions making it compulsory to mount the radiators which take up space. So Multi-GPU wise both cards have issues when it comes to installation but performance is where the main focus should be.

The review is pretty harsh to be honest since it calls the card a no buy due to its insane pricing and poor price to performance ratio against its competitor and dual SLI solution based cards. Out of several titles such as 3DMark FireStrike, 3DMark 11, Sleeping Dogs, Unigine Valley, the card only turned out to be faster in Batman: Arkham Origins, Stone Giant and Tomb Raider and that by a small margin which doesn’t justify the $1500 US more cost. The card even underperformed against GeForce GTX 780 Ti SLI which are more cheaper than a Radeon R9 295X2 and a faster solution then either dual-GPU based graphics card in the market.

The temperatures of the cards are higher which means that the closed loop liquid cooling solution did better on AMD’s part getting 60 / 62 C compared to 82 / 79 C on NVIDIA’s solution. The card only has advantages in power consumption where it consumes 618W at load compared to 678W on its competitor.